Videoconferencing in the enterprise has seen rapid growth in recent years as businesses have become global and employees interact with a large ecosystem of remote employees, partners, vendors and customers. At the same time, availability of cheap software solutions in the consumer sector and widespread availability of video cameras in laptop and mobile devices has fueled wide adoption of video chat to stay connected with family and friends.
However, the landscape of options available for videoconferencing remains fragmented into isolated islands that cannot communicate well with each other. Within the enterprise there are hardware based conference rooms equipped with videoconferencing systems from vendors such as Polycom, Tandberg and LifeSize, and high end Telepresence systems popularized by vendors such as Cisco. At the lower end of the price spectrum are software based enterprise videoconferencing applications such as Microsoft's Lync as well as consumer video chat applications such as Skype, GoogleTalk and Apple's FaceTime.
There are significant trade-offs between price, quality and reach when choosing to use any of the above systems for a video call. Large corporations invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in their Telepresence systems to achieve low latency, high-definition calls but can only reach a small subset of people that have access to similar systems. Medium sized businesses invest tens of thousands of dollars in their hardware based systems to achieve up to 720p High Definition (HD) quality. They buy hardware Multi-Party Conferencing Units (MCU) worth hundreds of thousands of dollars with a fixed number of “ports” and use these to communicate between their different branch offices, but are at a loss when it comes to communicating easily with systems outside their company. Companies that cannot afford these settle for lower quality best-effort experiences using clients such as Skype, but on the flip side are able to easily connect with others whether they be inside or outside their own companies. Average users find these trade-offs when using videoconferencing too complicated to understand compared to audio calls using mobile or landline telephones that “just work” without them thinking about all of these trade-offs. As a result there is low adoption of videoconferencing in business even though the technology is easily available and affordable to most people.
Today, more than ever before, there is a need for a service that removes this tradeoff and provides a high-quality video call at almost the price of an audio call without the user having to think about complicated trade-offs. Such a service would connect disparate hardware and software videoconferencing and chat systems from different vendors, talking different protocols (H.323, SIP, XMPP, proprietary) and have different video and audio codecs talk to each other. It would offer very low latency and a much better viewing experience than current solutions. It would be hosted in the Internet/cloud, thereby removing the need for complicated equipment with significant capital and operating investment within the enterprise. Ease of use would be as simple as setting up an audio conference call without the need for complicated provisioning arrangements from corporate IT.
The foregoing examples of the related art and limitations related therewith are intended to be illustrative and not exclusive. Other limitations of the related art will become apparent upon a reading of the specification and a study of the drawings.